Abstract
The Dooars region of West Bengal in India is a major tea producing region that contributes around 25% of the national tea yield. Changes in weather patterns along with the increased frequency of drought, storms, flood, etc. are likely to affect the tea industry adversely as tea production is reliant on the climate of the tea-growing region. In spite of the tea industry being the primary contributor of the Dooars economy, to date, the impact of climatic variables on tea yield in Dooars region remains unexplored. Here, we have developed a panel dataset that includes monthly data of the tea gardens of Dooars region over a 10-year period and statistically analysed the effects of climatic variables including temperature, precipitation, drought intensity, magnitude of warm-wet condition and precipitation intensity on tea yield. Overall, our seasonal analysis suggested that higher temperature during summer and monsoon seasons affected tea yield. Contrastingly, higher temperature during winter months and summer and winter rainfall were found to be beneficial for the increase in tea yield. An excessive and sporadic rainfall and a combination of hotter and wetter weather condition during monsoon months had a detrimental effect on tea yield. Finally, projections using climate models under different emission scenario predicted reduction of monsoon production under extreme carbon emission. The analyses and predictions of our study will be beneficial for tea garden managers of Dooars region in particular and northern India in general in adopting strategies to prevent the tea plantations from being affected due to climate change.
Highlights
Besides being the second most consumed beverage worldwide (Statista Research Department, 2016), the demand of tea in the world market has always been on the rise as an ideal liquid refreshment
In this paper by performing statistical analyses, we evaluated how tea yield in Dooars region is shaped by major climatic variables including monthly rainfall and temperature as well as extreme weather situations
Our analysis showed that tea yield in Dooars area was not sensitive to drought events, only the production of the month of May was affected due to drought event, which can be attributed to reduced rainfall and an increase in minimum average temperature (Table 1), as these climatic variables had significant effects on tea yield during summer months
Summary
Besides being the second most consumed beverage worldwide (Statista Research Department, 2016), the demand of tea in the world market has always been on the rise as an ideal liquid refreshment. A total of 140.44 thousand hectares of land under tea enables West Bengal to become the second-best tea producing Indian state that contributes to almost 30% of the national tea yield in India (FAO, 2016; Madhumitha, 2020). The Dooars region, in terms of its location, tea production, total area under tea and contribution to Indian tea economy, calls for an in-depth analysis of the effects of the climatic variation in this region on the tea yield to uncover the challenges the tea industry here is encountering. In this paper by performing statistical analyses, we evaluated how tea yield in Dooars region is shaped by major climatic variables including monthly rainfall and temperature as well as extreme weather situations
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